Arch Hurd progress

I thought I would give a bit of an overview of where the Arch Hurd
project is up to. There are two main people doing most of the packaging
at the moment (not including me - time taken by Arch Linux lately has
restricted me to more of adviser lately...) and there appear to be
several other interested people from the mailing list and forum thread.
So it is building up the core team it needs to get things done.

We have passed several important milestones. Firstly, we managed to
cross compile a booting i686-pc-gnu system. The major stumbling block
there was gnumach. When compiling for i686 it requires -O1 to be
used. -O0 results in a build error and -O2 results in the boot process
stalling very, very early on. There are no such issues for i[45]86.
Once that was out of the way, the biggest issue we had was getting gcc
to work natively. That took orders of magnitude more time than getting
an actual booting system. But now we have an up-to-date and working
toolchain (gcc-4.4.3, glibc-2.11.1, binutils-2.20.1). We have a working
package manager (pacman) and have most of a minimal development system
compiled (see http://www.archhurd.org/packages.php for the list of
packages). The current system compiles and plays Rogue nicely!

Our main focus is getting the basic system a bit more polished, in terms
adding new software and improving current packages (especially
re-enabling features that were disabled due to lack of available
dependencies). We are also beginning to look at basic usability setup
(which translators and devices to start, getting out of single user
mode, etc). So we are still a while off being able to provide a QEMU
image that will represent an Arch Hurd system, but we are doing quite
well for just over three months progress.